1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems for collecting and accruing labor activity data under many-to-many employment relation and with distributed access. More particularly, this invention falls into the general domain of labor monitoring and payroll accounting, in which an employee's pay is quantitatively related to labor activity performed by the employee under an employment relation.
2. Background Description
Many-to-many employment relation refers to the situation in which an employee may have multiple employers, and an employer may hire more than employee at a time. Many-to-many employment relation exists in many industrial sectors, especially in industries where short-term employment with seasonal workers is a prevailing labor practice. A representative example is agricultural industry, in which seasonal workers and immigration workers move swiftly from one field operation to another. These workers may work for more than one employer concurrently. Labor activities have to be accrued according to employment under which these activities take place. The question is how to efficiently and effectively identify the employment under which a labor activity takes place. Currently, the prevailing practice is to collect and accrue data on a per employer basis. Each employer operates his own system to monitor labor activities in his field operation. For an application in which the employment relation is reasonably stable and the majority number of employees hold just one job at a time, the cost of operating a labor monitoring system for each employer may be justified. However, under a many-to-many employment relation, individually operated monitoring systems induce extra overhead and prevent further integration of labor information.
For example, consider an employee, John, who works for multiple farms concurrently. During a cherry-pick season, he spends mornings of work days alternatively in two cherry orchards to pick up fruits, and in the afternoon, he prunes trees in an apple orchard. If each orchard runs its own labor data collection and accruing system, John needs to register with each individual farm. Not only is the process is unnecessary, it is also error-prone. What if John's information is entered incorrectly during one of these registrations? Moreover, because John is presented as an individual entity in each system, each employer has to independently verify his information, including work eligibility, which is a big issue in agricultural operations in the United States.
What is needed are methods that enable the consolidation of individually operated labor monitoring systems. A key challenge in the consolidation is how to accurately identify the employment relation under which a labor activity takes place.
Another challenge in consolidating labor monitoring systems is to provide distributed and controlled access to labor data. With recent advances in Internet technology, especially in portable personal computing devices such as tablets and smartphones, there is an increasing need to access labor data anywhere, any time, and on any device.